COMEDIAN Ben Miller is bringing one of Britain’s most loathsome monarchs back to life in Horrible Histories: King John And The Magna Carta

Ben Miller is bringing one of Britain’s most loathsome monarchs back to life in Horrible Histories

Ben Miller is a much-loved comic actor whose dry sense of humour and impeccable timing lent themselves perfectly to the sketch series he starred in as half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller and more recently in Death In Paradise. Even though he left the BBC1 murder mystery series two years ago, the memories still linger of his starchy DI Richard Poole with his insistence on wearing woollen suits and drinking tea in the sweltering heat of the Caribbean.

The TV Ben has done since has been aimed mostly at kids. He has a three-year-old son, Harrison, with his wife, TV executive Jessica Parker, and a son, Sonny, eight, from his first marriage to The Inbetweeners’ actress Belinda Stewart-Wilson.

Along with a stint as the Sheriff of Nottingham in an episode of Doctor Who last year,

Ben appeared with Harry Hill in the Christmas movie The Incredible Adventures Of Professor Branestawm and he has a cameo role in the upcoming children’s film Molly Moon: The Incredible Hypnotist. He was also in What We Did On Our Holiday, opposite Rosamund Pike and David Tennant, and on stage in the political satire The Duck House.

This week he is back on children’s TV with a starring role in a one-off special of the Horrible Histories series, King John And The Magna Carta.

Bringing history to life by telling gruesome, little known, but true tales in a sketch-show format, Horrible Histories was a mega-hit during its five-year run from 2009 to 2013 and was the first children’s TV series to win a British Comedy Award.

In 2012 he published a science book, It’s Not Rocket Science, in which he shared his enthusiasm for scientific principles and made them fun. Science became Ben’s hobby after he nearly made it his career – he was a PhD physics student at Cambridge before going into comedy.

In Horrible Histories he tackles a real villain of history, King John, who ruled England from 1199 until 1216. King John’s tale was covered in Horrible Histories: Measly Middle Ages but his reign led to such big changes in society that the story is worth telling again – especially in the year the BBC is celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.

John was the medieval king whose reign was so disastrous – so bad, in fact, that we’ve never had another King John – that in 1215 his own subjects rose up and forced him to sign a document limiting his powers. That document – the Magna Carta – became one of the most important in British history, forming the basis of the democracy we have today.

Ben plays John, the misfit younger brother of King Richard I, known to history as the Lionheart. The big brother was hailed a hero for all his crusading and derring-do in the Holy Land, but King John, by comparison, was a dead loss. He lost English territory in France, got himself excommunicated by the Pope, and angered the nobility by increasing taxes to pay for his failed military campaigns. Later, he managed to lose the crown jewels in The Wash in East Anglia.

The nobility, having had enough, forced John to sign the Magna Carta, which among other things protected the individual from capricious kings by limiting their powers of taxation and guaranteeing citizens a fair trial.

In keeping with Horrible Histories’ brief to make history fun, the signing of the Magna Carta is played out as a rap and favourite character Grim Reaper returns as the chat show host who welcomes John after his death and invites him to reflect on his achievements – or lack thereof.

Achievements aren’t something Ben is short of. Although he never got that PhD, he did win a Bafta in 2010 for The Armstrong & Miller Show and it’s a pleasure to have him back on screen making history fun asa thoroughly rotten king.